My Writing

22 February, 2019

Dixie's Land 7.3


[Concluding chapter seven]

Stewart and Patton joined the happy crowd thronging from Placide's Varieties onto the sidewalk. It was relief to be out in the fresh air. Patton was still laughing at the comic antics of the final act on the program; Stewart, familiar to the point of boredom with the play, had had other things on his mind. Thomas, for instance: the servant had been reluctant to leave the hotel, and only when persuaded of the mission’s importance to Virginia’s future had he agreed to visit Barber’s hotel this evening. Stewart had already written a pass for Thomas when Patton, laughing, had pointed out that passes weren’t necessary in Canada. Nobody here would question a negro on the streets unsupervised. It was that realization that prevented Stewart from fully enjoying his anticipated meeting with Miss Martin.

"Why, Captain Stewart, how nice of you to come and see me again." Pauline Martin stood up, smiling, as Stewart and Patton were let into the room. Her face was still heavily made up, and she looked a little like a poorly done child's painting. Through the paint, though, Stewart could still see the exotic beauty that had taken up residence in his mind.

"I did say I would try and bring my friend to see you perform," he said, making just enough of a bow to impress the other women in the room. "And once again you were splendid, I thought." Turning to introduce Patton, he stopped short for a moment on realizing that his friend was standing, jaw agape like some pantomime country-boy, staring at the women—in various stages of undress, almost all of them shocking—as though he'd never seen a woman at all before, much less one still in the process of putting on her dress.

Stewart thumped Patton on the back to bring him back to reality. "Allow me to introduce my compatriot, Captain George Patton of the Confederate States Army. Captain Patton, Miss Pauline Martin." He faltered, suddenly unsure of himself. "As I said, I thought you were especially good tonight. Captain Patton agreed with me.” He turned to Patton, and glared down the man’s incipient denial. “We were curious about how an actress prepares for a role. Would you mind enlightening me, over dinner?" That was terrible, he told himself. You’ll deserve it if she laughs you out of the building.

"I would be delighted, sir," she said. "And if you don't object, I will ask one of my fellow cast-members if she would like to accompany your dashing companion." From the way Patton preened at this, Stewart was in no doubt that Patton, whatever he thought about what Stewart had just said, didn't object to the result.
* * * *
The reception in Antoine's restaurant was, if anything, even more courteous than he and Patton had received in Maspero's. Though the room was crowded, they and their guests were immediately shown to a table which offered a fine view of both the room and, through a large window, the street outside. They were back in the old quarter, which meant that the food was French and very rich. I hope I can remember the details of this evening well enough to put them into a letter home, he thought. Most of the details, at any rate.

They were talking about the play. "Is this the sort of thing that's common on the New Orleans stage?" Stewart asked. "It seems more frivolous than I'd expected from the English."

"There is no single style of theater here," Pauline said. "You'll find everything from the latest Parisian plays to the lowest of music-hall japery—like the thing we appear in. There's even a vogue now for this new musical performance from New York—'black-face,' I believe they call it."

"Trying to make nigger work songs into popular entertainment for white folks is just the sort of perversion you'd expect from Yankees," Patton said.

"It seems to me to be undignified," Stewart said. "Prancing around with cork on your face degrades both you and your subject." Stewart saw something cross Pauline's face, then vanish. "No offense meant, Miss Martin," he said hastily. "I know that I should be more careful with the way I speak; our way of life is not yours."

"What did you think of Pauline's performance in the first scene?" Pauline's friend asked.

"The first scene?" Stewart thought a moment. "No. It was the last scene that she graced."

"Ah, that's what the program says," Pauline said. "I think I'm being indirectly praised here, Marie-Anne. Do you mean that you truly didn't recognize me in the first scene?"

"You have me at a disadvantage, Miss Martin, for surely I did not."

Marie-Anne laughed and clapped her hands. "Splendid!" she cried. "You are to be congratulated, Pauline."

"I understudy several of the other women," Pauline explained. "Sally was ill tonight—that's 'Mrs. Buchanan' in the program—and I was called on to fill in for her. I played the elderly mother in the first scene, then had to change costume and re-do my makeup in time for my regular appearance. I take it from the look of consternation on your face that I truly did disappear into the role."

"Were we not already indoors, Miss Martin, my hat would be off to you," Patton said. "I don't know much about theater myself, but I was impressed tonight. And Stewart here is something of an expert on the stage, or so he tells me. He's been going to plays since he was a child."

"Really?" Pauline leaned toward him, fluttering her lashes. "What great actresses have you seen, sir, whom you can flatter me by comparing me with?"

"I would never dream of comparing you with anyone," Stewart said, flustered at the boldness of her gaze. "Your accent is most unusual, Marie-Anne," Stewart said, desperate to change the subject. Pauline's friend was a blue-eyed blonde whose nose was perhaps a shade too long and her lips too thin—not that Patton seemed to have noticed. Her skin was if anything an even more pale white than Pauline’s.

"I'm from up the river," Marie-Anne said. "My people are Acadien."

"Acadien?" Patton struggled with the word. "Do you mean 'Acadian,' as in the poem?"

"They're often called 'Cajun' down here," Pauline said, "but yes, they're Evangeline's people. What an irony, to have been exiled here and then fifty years later have the same power come into possession of your new home."

"My family doesn't consider it ironic," Marie-Anne said, making a face. "Papa won't come to the city at all, because his papa refused to have anything more to do with the English because of the way they treated his papa's papa or something."

"That's more or less exactly how Stewart here feels," Patton said, a piece of chop dangling from his fork. "He still resents the British—sorry, the English—for the way they treated Bonnie Prince Charlie over a hundred years ago."

"I don't believe that's a matter for jesting, Patton," Stewart said. "'Never forget' is my family's motto, or at least it ought to be. Doesn't your family have some old grudge that it treasures? Or are you perhaps suggesting that we should just apologize to the Federals and crawl back into the Union?"

"The two of you sound exactly like a pair of Creole planters," Pauline said, picking up her wine-glass. "Why don't you argue about something practical?"

"Practical? We're officers," Patton said. "We're not allowed to be practical."

"I'm afraid you'll have to explain that remark to me, Miss Martin," Stewart said, laughing. "How exactly are the Creole gentlemen not practical?"

"Well," Pauline said, dropping her voice dramatically, "you might not have noticed anything amiss here this evening, but I certainly did. Ordinarily, a place such as Antoine's would not dream of entertaining a pair of actresses."

"To the Creoles—and the rich Anglos as well—we're considered lower in standing than the quadroon girls they keep as mistresses, and only somewhat above prostitutes," Marie-Anne said. "Because we—"

"The point is," Pauline interrupted, "we would not normally be allowed in here. Because we're with the gallant Confederate soldiers, our outcast status is overlooked. And do you want to know why?"

"Of course we do," Patton sputtered. "What a question."

"That was rhetoric, Captain Patton." Pauline smiled. "I know you want to know. It's because these pathetic old gentlemen have never given up the idea that they can somehow throw the British out of Louisiana, and they look on you as perhaps being the means of their liberation. If I had a shilling for every half-formed plot I've had to listen to while entertaining a Creole gentleman's son, I could buy myself a boarding-house and live a life of comfort, if not luxury. If there is a less practical species of human being on the face of the earth than the Louisiana Creole Gentleman, I have yet to meet it."

"So far as you're concerned, then, the English are here to stay," Stewart said. It felt extremely odd to be discussing politics with a woman, but at the same time he felt a giddiness that seemed to enhance the flavors of the meat and wine.

"They've been here nearly fifty years," Pauline said. "The children of the first British settlers have had their own children, and sometimes grand-children now. This is their home, and they already outnumber the Creoles and the Cajuns and the Spanish in combination. Then there are the German and Italian and Bohemian immigrants who don't care about this country's history but just want cheap land and the chance to farm it without being oppressed by some baron or other. All in all, I'd say the chances of Louisiana ever being French again are slightly worse than those of the Devil ruling in Heaven."

"Good Lord," Patton said. "Are you always this outspoken, Miss Martin?"

"In my profession," Pauline said, "no one ever remembers the quiet and retiring ones."

"You must be very well remembered, then."

"You make me blush, Captain Patton." Pauline laughed. "But surely you gentlemen want to talk about something other than politics this evening."

"I'm not so sure of that," Stewart said. "I'm finding this fascinating, myself. Perhaps you can answer a question that's been nagging at me since we arrived here, Miss Martin. What exactly is a 'Canadian'?" He took a sip of wine, and when he looked up it was to see a sly smile playing across Pauline's face. "I know what the newspapers say. But it seems to me that in the few days that I've been here I've met Irishmen and Frenchmen and far more Englishmen than I'd care to. But I've never met anyone who was a 'Canadian' the way that Patton and I are Virginians."

“I’ll answer that question,” Pauline said, “if you’ll tell me why you keep saying ‘English’ when everyone else says ‘British’.”

“That’s easy. Anyone from the British Isles is British. My family comes from Scotland, which—rightly or wrongly—is part of Great Britain. But it’s the English who threw out King James and brought in those fat Hanoverian tyrants, and the English who slaughtered my ancestors at Culloden.”

“So it’s ‘British’ if he likes you,” Patton said, “and ‘English’ if he doesn’t. Most of the time he doesn’t. Stewart here would make a good general: they don’t like much, in my experience.”

“If it’s you they’re looking at,” Stewart said, “the attitude is understandable. So.” He turned to Pauline. “What is a Canadian, and where are they?”

"Oh, they're out there," Pauline said. "But you would be hard-pressed to find one, especially here, who'd admit to being a Canadian first and foremost. Don't forget, Captain, that you Virginians have been in your country for nearly two hundred years. Canada as a country has only existed for a handful of years, and it doesn't really know yet what it wants to be when it grows up." She gestured at Marie-Anne. "But up north, where Marie-Anne's people come from, you would have no trouble finding people who think of themselves as Canadian. Up north, along the St. Lawrence, is where the name comes from. It sits as comfortably on those people as does 'Virginian' on you. When those of us down in this swampland will start to identify ourselves as Canadian the way our snow-bound compatriots do is another question. Perhaps we never will. After all, it hasn't taken long for you and your fellow-Southerners to decide that you don't identify yourselves as citizens of the United States, has it?"

"I guess I never really thought much about it," Stewart said. "All in all, this has been an eye-opening year for me."

"I've been meaning to ask you about that," Pauline said. "My friends tell me that you were at Harper's Ferry. If you wouldn't mind, could you tell me about that battle? What did it look like when they were trying to out-flank you?"

For a moment, as he began to explain the mechanisms by which men were moved on a battlefield, it occurred to Stewart to wonder if Pauline was as interested as her glowing face and lively eyes suggested, or whether this was all part of an act. Then he decided he didn't care. Watching her watch him as he spoke, he was reminded of the hetaerae of ancient Greece, those women skilled in the social graces who made their living entertaining men. Some—General Jackson among them—were apt to view these women as little better than over-educated whores. Stewart might have belonged to that company once. Not any more. He decided that he liked the attention Pauline was paying him.

And when, at the end of a fanciful evening that passed far too quickly, he escorted her to the shabby building in which she lived, and she asked him to escort her up the stairs to her third-floor room, he did not say no.

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